You're absolutely correct about the dark side, and I would never want to minimize the complexity or sheer effort required to self-manage a music project. Like any startup, it is not easy and you are wholly responsible for everything that happens -- including any mistakes, of which they will likely be many. This is far too daunting for some people, and understandably so, particularly when they just want to "make some rad music with my friends, man."

That said, all of those professional services are directly hirable by any musician, without the need for a label middleman. The best move a band can make, is hire someone to handle the thing they least want to do. As you mentioned, posting on social media is the most hated of all tasks for a lot of folks, and in that situation your first hire should be a publicist (aka social media manager). It gets the largest monkey off your back, and frees up that time for all of the other business stuff that still needs to get done.

That said, you could also hire a publicist for a day, and they could assemble a social media schedule for you, and provide a bunch of templates to use, and take all of the mystery out of what to post and when and how and why. And now instead of paying a retainer or sharing gross, you're paying someone in the band to do it, and all of the money stays with the group.

As for your prediction, you're correct about that, as well, because it's already starting to happen. Many people, like myself, offer a sort of label/manager on-demand service, where for a very small consultation fee, the band gets a monthly analysis of where they're at and what steps they need to be taking, along with all of the granular instructions on how to accomplish those tasks. If I had to guess, there are currently about 1,000 people doing this around the world, but that number is growing rapidly. There are also a lot of tools springing up to help simplify those tasks.

Would be interesting to get a breakdown of your work by genre and so on. It's super interesting. Have you considered writing content about this (that doesn't give away your business)? [Alternatively, how would I begin to start learning about this?]

I keep meaning to start writing or creating videos, but at the end of the day, there are already a bunch of people producing that content and doing it very well. I will write a longer piece eventually about some particular topics that I think are overlooked or not understood, but I'd much rather stick to the Zoom calls where I actually get to meet people and answers questions and offer advice specific to their situation -- it's a very rewarding experience to watch people go from being confused about a topic, to understanding it, and even being excited or motivated by it.

As for learning, YouTube is your best friend. There's a mountain of music business content on there, and most of it is very accurate to reality.

https://www.youtube.com/c/berkleemusic/videos

https://www.youtube.com/c/MusicBiz/videos

https://www.youtube.com/c/IndieMusicAcademy/videos

Thanks, appreciate it. I'll start with those videos. It's not so much for me, but rather friends who would need a push in the right direction. I might reach out to you again, if any of them are interested (as you said elsewhere, it really depends on how the individual responds to the realities of the music business...)